Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Is it possible to make the map itself rotatable so you can view the world from different angles?

What ?

I know that in many games, such as Rim World, rotating the map is not available, but still, some games allow players to do so, like Don't Starve, Planet Base, and Evil Genius.( I'm sure you understand what I mean by "rotating the map", so...no pictures. .. )
Perhaps it is highly improbable to implement such feature in Factorio, but I'm not sure, so here I am suggesting this idea.

Why ?

Well.. because by rotating the map you could see the back of all those machines? And if you feel your view is being blocked by trees or stuff, you could try another angle and your view is clear.

Maybe not a big deal, but would make Factorio a bit nicer, in my opinion.

No, because there would need to be many more graphics made to accomodate this rotation.

Turn your monitor .

Koub wrote:No, because there would need to be many more graphics made to accomodate this rotation.

Some entities already exist in all possible rotations, e.g. biters, players, cars, trains, ...
The main problems are buildings. But, due to the HR graphics update, most entities should already have proper 3D models that could be used. But the renderer would need to be reworked to be capable of 3D rendering which would be nice, but needs way too much effort.

If we limit camera rotation to 90° steps there's a cheap solution that allows keeping the current renderer: Just use the sprite with matching rotation.
The only vanilla entity requiring special treatment in this case is the pumpjack, where the sprite has to be mirrored for 90°- and 270°-rotations. Or, generally speaking, buildings where the connection points after an 90° ingame rotation don't match up with the result of a "real world" rotation.
The only real problem are mods adding non-square non-rotatable buildings (like the old 2x1 laser turrets before 0.12). These need a new "sideways" graphic.

To my knowledge, now that trains are always constant, there are no objects in the game with different length/width.

If you don't mind entities not apparently rotating when you rotate the map, then I see no reason whatsoever this is not possible.

It will probably be obscenely expensive however do do via mod script, due to the sheer number of objects and tiles that must be moved. Might break a bunch of other stuff, no idea.

If the Devs made it, sure, doubt it would even be hard.


It would only be hard if you inisisted on rotated graphics for every structure. It might look weird, but it wouldn't effect gameplay, and would still give you that new perspective.

A rotate option could be just the 4 directions so that all sprites could remain the same. In don't starve everything is 2d and rotate with the camera. It could work like that in factorio too.

The Factorio and Don't Starve graphics style is completely different though, so I doubt it would look good here. For example Factorio has shadows which would stay in the same place as you rotated unless there were seperate renders for all 4 directions, which probably wouldn't be worth it.

And don't even suggest making the game 3D, the 3D models are currently very high quality, so probably take hours to render. A normal computer running at 60fps would have no chance XD

Map rotating isn't terribly difficult if you consider that everything on screen is placed by using an X and Y coordinate. Instead of (X right, Y down) to display normally you display (Y right, X up) to rotate CCW, (X down, Y left) to rotate CW, and (X left, Y up) for a full 180.

Anything less than a full 90 degree turn would be far more difficult to manage. The art in Factorio was not meant to be dislodged from tiles.

Out of all the things with rotating art, only the assembler, rocket silo, biter nests and trees don't have rotations. They would look pretty weird if the screen spun around.

But rotating the map could help finding the dropped item behind an assembler

Nidan wrote:

Koub wrote:No, because there would need to be many more graphics made to accomodate this rotation.

Some entities already exist in all possible rotations, e.g. biters, players, cars, trains, ...
The main problems are buildings. But, due to the HR graphics update, most entities should already have proper 3D models that could be used. But the renderer would need to be reworked to be capable of 3D rendering which would be nice, but needs way too much effort.

If we limit camera rotation to 90° steps there's a cheap solution that allows keeping the current renderer: Just use the sprite with matching rotation.
The only vanilla entity requiring special treatment in this case is the pumpjack, where the sprite has to be mirrored for 90°- and 270°-rotations. Or, generally speaking, buildings where the connection points after an 90° ingame rotation don't match up with the result of a "real world" rotation.
The only real problem are mods adding non-square non-rotatable buildings (like the old 2x1 laser turrets before 0.12). These need a new "sideways" graphic.

This suits my purpose completely. Rotating at any degrees is not necessary, because you would be able to see behind trees and machines to find hidden objects by simply rotating 90°.
When I lay down rails amidst dense forests horizontally, or when I want to place miners on ores which have trees right below them, it could be very hard to see and select the correct objects with trees blocking the view. If the map could be rotated 90 degrees, the view would be much clearer.

this miner has trees below and it's blocked from view


this miner has trees on the right, and it's easy to see it clearly


some machines hides objects behind them, too, but it's not a big deal compared to trees.

I do hope maps could be rotated 90° in the future.